Victor Miller is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with an unusual campaign promise: If elected, he will not be calling the shots—an AI bot will. VIC, the Virtual Integrated Citizen, is a ChatGPT-based chatbot that Miller created. And Miller says the bot has better ideas—and a better grasp of the law—than many people currently serving in government.
“I realized that this entity is way smarter than me, and more importantly, way better than some of the outward-facing public servants I see,” he says. According to Miller, VIC will make the decisions and Miller will be its “meat puppet,” attending meetings, signing documents, and otherwise doing the corporeal job of running the city.
But whether VIC—and Victor—will be allowed to run at all is still an open question.
Because it’s not legal for a bot to run for office, Miller says he is technically the one on the ballot, at least on the candidate paperwork filed with the state.
When Miller went to register his candidacy at the county clerk’s office, he says, he “wanted to use Vic without my last name. And so I had read the statute, so it merely said that you have to print what you are generally referred to as. So you know, most people call me Vic. My name is Victor Miller. So on the ballot Vic is short for Victor Miller, the human.”
No comments:
Post a Comment